The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. - movie reviews

National Review, May 14, 1990 by John Simon

Finally, though, Albert does follow Georgina into the ladies' lieu, but in lieu of catching on, merely makes himself gratuitously loathsome. The lovers must seek another hideaway, and the Cook first shelters them in the larder, where they have sex amid a legion of unplucked pheasants, literally making it in the feathers. When the Thief comes ferreting into the kitchen, the Cook hides the lovers in the cold-storage room, where love keeps them warm until he arranges their escape in a rotting-food truck, where their love is further fertilized by decomposing pigs' heads and fish innards. They find eventual refuge in the book depository, where Michael is cataloguing some half-million to a million volumes (I'm bad at guessing numbers), and where the hymn-squealing albino punker-castrato-hermaphrodite brings them meals from the Cook.

At this point, the film goes a bit queer. So uncouth, in fact, that I leave it to you to seek it out if your taste runs to tastelessness. I'll pass on to the music, costumes, sex, and mise-enscene. The music is by Michael Nyman, whose career is as bizarre as if it had been composed, or at least orchestrated, by Peter Greenaway. His score here is a queasy blend of baroque and rock, outlandish and insinuating, the aural equivalent of the Cook's cuisine, with perhaps the odd pig's head thrown in, to make sure it goes on your nerves, its ultimate intended destination.

The costumes are by one of the enfants terribles of haute couture, Jean Paul Gaultier. (The other two, Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, are undoubtedly eating each other's heart out.) Their thrust is, besides jabots for the gangsters, fancy outfits and provocative undies for Georgina. These are an amalgam of cancan dancers' costumes out of Toulouse-Lautrec, whores' gear out of Genet's The Balcony, and saddles by Hermes--with, by the bye, coiffures to match. Though Helen Mirren (Georgina) is seldom wholly naked--at her age, it might not be seemly--her breasts and genitalia are dutifully exposed. As for Alan Howard (Michael), he's frequently in the buff to huff and puff with Miss Mirren in simulated sex that is less erotic than ornamental, presumably to better fit the decor.

That decor, surely, is what the film is about. Since I could hardly match such eloquence, let the press kit do the cataloguing: "1) the lavish restaurant dining room, where most of the verbal and physical abuse occurs, is bloodred, symbolizing danger; 2) the kitchen, where the lovers secretly meet, is jungle-green, suggesting safety; 3) the parking lot, where the lovers flee, is a cold ultramarine, connoting the netherworld; 4) the lovers' hideaway [book depository] is gold, to represent the golden age of learning and implying an Eden of reborn innocents; 5) a children's hospital ward, which is the yellow of eggyolk and spring [?]; and 6) the lavatories, where the lovers begin their affair, is [sic] the shadowless incandescent white of heaven."

Accordingly, when Georgina moves from one space to another, her dress changes from red (dining room) to white (lavatory) to green (kitchen). I have always considered the interior decorator one of the more sinister influences on modern life, particularly when, like Peter Greenaway, he sets himself up as a social-metaphysical moviemaker. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is part post-modern vomitorium, part pseudo-Bunuelian existential parable, and altogether indesirable. Kathy Acker, the expatriate American punker-novelist, has characterized Greenaway: "If his films are--and are about--any one thing, it is the connection between perception, art, philosophy, mythologies, sexuality, and the political." That sure is some "any one thing."